Articles

Podcasts

None. But scroll down for details of a new episode of The 9pm Edict in just a few days.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

On Monday morning, I dropped into Tech Leaders Forum, and had a coffee on their tab. Nothing newsworthy was said, however.

The Week Ahead

I’m spending the short work week before Easter in Lilyfield, in Sydney’s inner west, as well as Easter itself. I’ll be working steadily through three geek-for-hire projects, catching up a big chunk of that bookkeeping for the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), and writing a ZDNet column.

On Wednesday night, I’m finally recording and streaming that episode of The 9pm Edict podcast. That’s at 2100 AEDT on this website. Details will be posted on Monday.

That much-delayed episode of The 9pm Edict podcast will be produced and posted over the weekend. The recording won’t be streamed live, for a number of reasons, though I might stream the finished podcast at a specific time so you can enjoy it together.

Further Ahead

The short week after Easter will be an extension of the plan just described. So will the following week, at least at this stage.

[Photo:Old Target. Today I found one of the National Rifle Association regulation practice targets that I used when I went to American Shooters, a firearms range in Las Vegas, in 2011. I think I need some more practice.]

One, I failed to identify a commentator I quoted, someone who’d given their opinion of America’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Two, my description of a bolt bomb was misleading. Three, I may not have been entirely clear in expressing my opinion of Australia’s Attorney-General.

I cringe when people talk about the “train station”. “It’s ‘railway station’, you morons,” screams my brain. Well as it turns out, they’re actually not stupid — at least not for that reason. It’s just another relatively modern shift in language.

The chart at the top of the post is a Google Ngram search of their entire English corpus since 1820 — the first public steam railway in the world was the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened in 1825 — comparing the usage of “railway station” (blue) versus “railroad station” (red) and “train station” (orange).

As you can see, the most common usage has almost always been “railway station”, with “railroad station” distinctly second-place. A “train station” wasn’t even a thing until the 1950s, but it rose in popularity quite quickly. “Train station” has been the most common usage since the mid-1990s, although it has been declining again since around 2000. I wonder why.

My understanding is that many railway terms derived from the military, because until the railways came along nothing else had been organised on that sort of trans-national and even trans-continental scale except armies. Hence trains have “guards” for their safe operation, and “stations” along the line where staff are stationed to maintain the entire railway system — including fuel, water, trackwork and signalling.

Railway stations are therefore part of a railway’s entire operation, not merely “train stations” for trains to stop at. For me, someone talking about “train stations” is showing their ignorance of how railways work: it’s more than just the trains.

Since I had the Google open in front of me, I thought I’d look at the variations in US versus UK English. It seems that “railroad station” isn’t the dominant American usage that I’d imagined.

On 31 January The New York Times reported that it had been hacked by China, their networks penetrated for some four months. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post too. So naturally I ended up writing about it.

“Countless organisations have experienced the same scenario in recent years,” I wrote. “But it’s big news this time because journalists were the targets.” Cynical, perhaps, but I gather security über-expert Bruce Schneier said much the same thing, so I’m kinda chuffed.

“Recent attacks on US newspapers are further proof that, despite making billions, the information security industry is pretty much screwed,” it begins. That one won’t make me any friends. So nothing new there.

I must admit, I found both stories fairly straightforward to write. I guess I’ve been writing about this stuff long enough to feel confident about it.

This will be my fifth visit to San Francisco in the last two years, and I must admit the place really is growing on me. Apart from the fact that it’s in that collapsing empire called the US. It does depress me to see the disabled veterans begging on the streets.

I mentioned this trip on Twitter about half an hour ago and already I’ve been told to visit a “beer mecca” called Toronado. What else, do you think?

The Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran’s uranium enrichment program was indeed launched by the US, according to a major investigative report published by the New York Times shortly before I was due to appear on ABC Local Radio this evening.

This is being posted a bit late. It’s a conversation about the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Wikipedia blackout originally broadcast on 18 January. So it’s been overtaken by more recent events.
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The presenters, as usual, are Keith Conlon and John Kenneally at 1395 FIVEaa, two chaps I used to work with back at ABC 891 Adelaide some… um, some years ago.

World’s most impatient meth cook found in Oklahoma. She couldn’t even wait to get home. Australians are self-obsessed entitled wankers. And won’t someone think of the children? Senator Conroy dropped the f-bomb on national television!

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly.

It’s a bit thin this week. After doing 30+ hours and a couple of all-nighters last weekend for that server migration I mentioned last time, I’ve been taking it slowly during this week. And I’m getting this post done on Friday night because I’m heading to Newcastle first thing tomorrow.

Podcasts

Patch Monday episode 59, “Opening up the cloud”. My guest is open-source software developer and advocate Jeff Waugh. In a wide-ranging conversation they cover Linode and OpenStack; as well as DevOps, a new software development paradigm that involves operational staff in the entire development process; a DevOps tool called Cucumber, and its plug-in cucumber-nagios, written by Australian developer Lindsay Holmwood; and the social source code management system Github. And Richard Chirgwin debunks the myth that optical fibre only lasts 15 or 20 years.

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